Verint for Citizen Engagement
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Manchester City Council Achieves 58% Online Channel Shift with Verint
Manchester City Council partnered with Verint to transform citizen engagement, enabling 500,000 residents to access services through their preferred channels.
Results
58%
Channel shift to online services delivery.
7 months
Deployment, including complex integrations.
Resilient services
Delivered in secure AWS cloud.
About Manchester City Council
Manchester City Council is partnering with Verint as part of an ambitious ‘Future Shape’ internal transformation program to re-imagine citizen and business engagement. Deployed in only seven months and replacing a legacy CRM platform, Verint for Citizen Engagement is automating everyday council processes, empowering employees, and helping the council achieve 58% channel shift – above the local government average. Live in AWS Cloud, the service is more resilient, while enabling 500,000 Manchester citizens to interact when they want, how they want, via their channel of choice.
Opportunity
Manchester City Council is the local authority for the city of Manchester, England. A ‘Future Shape’ internal transformation program is underway to enable the council to be in the best possible shape to deliver its ambitions as set out in its ‘Our Manchester Strategy’ whilst meeting external budget pressures.
Part of this involves the ‘Resident and Business’ transformation: a strategy to reimagine how the council engages everyday with people. Until recently, this engagement was underpinned by a 12-year-old legacy CRM platform, which struggled to deliver the exceptional service experiences citizens and businesses expected from a major, modern local authority.
For example, users needed to log in multiple times to access different services. The interfaces were not always easy to navigate. And there was limited functionality – people could not upload images to report issues such as flytipping or defective street furniture, for example. Moreover, mapping was not being fully utilized by the city, making it harder to pinpoint the location of particular reported issues.
A three-part strategy for change and agile engagement was subsequently developed, based on modernizing CRM, the content management system, and integration with the lines of business.
“Our goals were to simplify and automate the execution of simple and complex council processes,” says Alex Forbes, Programme Manager, Manchester City Council.
“We wanted to create customer-initiated cases from self-service channels and transform the user experience so that citizens and businesses could interact with the Council when and how they wanted, through any channel. We also wanted to introduce one unified customer interaction history.”
Solution
The city’s choice of Verint was made on several key factors: the reuse of processes, the proven nature of the platform and Verint’s ability to implement it, the existing library of shared processes, and Verint’s ability to work on the implementation in partnership with the city. “Verint worked as one with the council, sharing work on a 1one-third and two-thirds work-share basis,” says Forbes. “Their team also engaged realistically with the council based on practical rather than theoretical considerations.”
Deployed in the AWS Cloud, Verint for Citizen Engagement provides unlimited integration capabilities with other council services and lines of business, such as Revenue, and Benefits and Highways. It also scales seamlessly in line with future demand for council services. On initial go-live, the Verint solution is integrated with five systems.
By encouraging citizens to engage via online, self-service channels, the city is achieving significant channel shift, reducing the demand on the 40-strong contact center and ultimately increasing efficiency.
“Verint has enabled Manchester City Council to re-imagine its citizen-centric services delivery. We’re giving citizens and businesses more control, convenience, and agility. For example, people can now upload images to report graffiti and other issues.”
Benefits
Using Verint, the council has simplified and automated the execution of simple and complex business processes to support unpredictable demand for public services. Developed and deployed in only seven months (including the integration layer), this forward-thinking platform is creating simple, agile citizen engagement.
With Verint, the council has benefitted by:
- Transforming service experience: Enabled users to interact using the most efficient channel and receive a consistent outcome regardless of the mode of interaction.
- Improving channel shift: The city achieved 58% channel shift across the top ten case types in the months following go-live (as measured by the Verint Channel Shift Index), with further increase expected, as indicated by some of their individual top performers, like new recycling box ordering (90% channel shift) and road defect reports (79%).
- Scaling rapidly: Within one month of go-live, Verint supported 20,000 interactions among 500,000 citizens and businesses across Manchester.
- Delivering seamless public services engagement: Connects previously siloed services for faster, joined-up services delivery, including bulky collections bin requests, and pothole reporting/repair.
- Increasing service resilience: Deployed in a secure AWS cloud environment, the Verint solution is reducing risk and ensuring compliance with government frameworks. The city’s CRM has moved from being one of the city’s most vulnerable platforms to one of its most resilient.
- Enabling rapid innovation: Facilitated adoption of innovative new services and processes, such as AI.
- Facilitating continuing development: The Verint platform and the council’s agile approach have ensured that further development is offering new services to residents.
The city is now in Phase 2 of the CRM replacement, implementing enhancements and re-designing further forms and customer notification through testing and improved accessibility. Other improvements include email ingestion and expanding photo uploads; plus, onboarding other services, such as Revenue and Benefits, GDPR, and complaints.
Forbes concludes, “Verint answers the call for services that are open, easy to deploy, simple to use, and reduce complexity. This remarkable platform also allows the Council to connect and share data seamlessly to provide citizen-facing services.”
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